Havoc

I went into Havoc with some hope, but honestly, it was a huge disappointment. Right from the opening chase scene, I could barely keep watching. The camera work was absolutely terrible, with constant, aggressive shaking that made it nearly impossible to tell what was happening. It felt like they thought shaking the camera = intensity, but it just made everything look messy and annoying.

The lighting was awful too, CGI was shockingly bad. Most of the city night sequences looked like cheap video game cutscenes rather than a real movie. At times I honestly forgot I was watching a film and not some low budget game from a decade ago.

After the opening chase, I seriously considered turning it off. It felt like a bad video game come to life - unpolished, incoherent, and completely lacking any real atmosphere or tension even the car physics looked so bad and video game likish

Disappointing is an understatement.

Shooting is cartoony, characters miss a whole lot but fire a lot of bullets with almost no precision, combat is visceral, satisfying and gory and in style of the director, very similar in the way it was shot to the legendary The Raid, camera follows the action closely but as the action itself is hectic so is the camera so a lot of the scenes move really fast and have quick cuts in between action pieces.

Story is predictable and you start to understand the whole narrative in the first 30 mins and characters are too one dimensional to even slightly care about them.

Tom Hardy gives a slightly better performance here than he did in Venom, his character is gruff, gritty and jaded and he manages to somewhat sell it, but he shines in his fight choreography which is simply put glorious and over the top.

Gun violence on the other hand seems too gratuitous, characters suffer multiple injuries yet somehow are still left standing and are able to one shot someone else. Precision is completely thrown out the window in some segments of the movie, in one scene a character is shot through a car window with a shotgun blast that barely scratches him and in the next a character riding a train is shot down multiples times from a big distance with a pistol.

The entirety of the traffic in the movie is for some reason almost completely computer generated, cars move unrealistically and really look out of place, ruining the immersion and making the whole viewing experience seem really cheap. Pistols sound epic but not in a realistic way as every pistol fired sounds like a cannon being shot and a lot of pistols in the movie seem to have rapid fire capabilities in one scene then suddenly becoming single shot in the next. Submachine guns firing sounds like miniguns.

You really have to suspend your disbelief when watching this movie as it's so hilariously unrealistic.

I've never seen so many bullets used per kill in a movie ever. Also, they literally had infinite bullets per magazine. I wish I had those mags for my guns. Would take out a lot of wasted time at the range. I actually assumed this movie had to be made based off a video game and was shocked to see it wasn't.

Overall, entertaining but let's not actually debate if this movie is good lol. I'm a big Tom Hardy fan so anything he's in I'll watch based on him alone. I'm really looking forward to him being in a movie or series that allows him to use his acting skills. The past few movies he pretty much as played the same type of character.

Ok, this action packed crime film is bloody, brutal, gritty, but the importance of bodycount makes you get rif off your head the rest of the story. No one cares about the intrigue which only a handful of us will follow. The action is really powerful, well made, but the camera work is also "too much", it may make you dizzy. The action scene in the night club is inspired from JOHN WICK, maybe more than the previous THE RAID films - directed by the same guy. And this scene is too long for me, I nearly felt bored. The ending is lousy. Yes, a forgettable film. Tom Hardy is just OK. Not more. I prefered THE RAID features; concerning GANGS OF LONDON, I have not watched yet - also made by Gareth Evans.

I was waiting for this movie to be released for as long as it has been announced, and now that the wait is finally over - it's definitely disappointing.

Clearly something must have happened to the original execution of this movie. It was quietly delayed for years and was released on streaming just as quietly. It's certainly no "Raid", it's more like a tired Jason Statham type movie. Some of the things in it are plain bizzare, such as the setting. This feels like Gotham or some alternative version of RoboCop's Detroit. The CGI is awful, it's so weird it us even present here in such copious amounts considering what the director is known for. The story is simple, yet indescribably odd. The lighting is also a weak point of this movie. The casting is superb and some of the fights are fine, but again, coming from Gareth Evans it's a bare minimum of what you'd expect. This isn't a terrible movie by any stretch and you can enjoy it for what it turned out to be, but you have to keep your expectations surprisingly low.

The highlight of the movie is probably the club fight with Gesaffelstein blasting, but that's as good as it gets. Overall, pretty passable.